Class-Action Suit Targets Apple, Claiming 'Misrepresentations' of iOS Storage Needs

Apple’s allotment of onboard storage for consumer use on mobile devices is under fire in a class-action lawsuit brought in Northern California District Court in San Jose over what plaintiffs Paul Orshan and Christopher Endara, of Miami, call “storage capacity misrepresentations and omissions” about iOS 8. The complaint charges Apple with failing to disclose to consumers that as much as 23.1 percent of the advertised storage capacity of 8 and 16 GB iPhones, iPads and iPods will be consumed by iOS 8 and “unavailable for consumers” who buy the devices with iOS 8 installed. The suit cites the “marked discrepancy” between the devices' advertised capacity and available capacity, as the OS and other storage space unavailable to consumers consume "an extraordinary percentage” of the devices’ “limited storage capacity.” The complaint also says harm to consumers is compounded by the way Apple “aggressively markets” the fee-based iCloud storage system using “sharp business tactics” that involve offering to sell cloud capacity “in a desperate moment” such as when a consumer is trying to record an important event. “Each gigabyte of storage Apple shortchanges its customers amounts to approximately 400-500 high resolution photographs,” lawyers for the plaintiffs maintain. The suit says Apple’s advertisements of capacity are “deceptive and misleading” because they omit facts a consumer might consider when evaluating a product for purchase, including that as much as 3.7 GB of a 16 GB device is not available to the buyer for content storage. More than 20 percent of an iPhone 6+ with iOS 8 pre-installed is not available for consumer file storage, the suit says. The claimants also charge “misrepresentations” to device owners with predecessor operating systems who aren’t told that upgrading from iOS 7 to iOS 8 will cost a device 600 MB to 1.3 GB of storage space, “a result that no consumer could reasonably anticipate.” An Apple spokeswoman told us the company had no comment on the lawsuit. She referred us to the Apple website where the company offers iOS users 5 GB of iCloud storage for free and noted that the total user storage available to users -- on a device plus free iCloud storage -- exceeds the amount of storage the claimants said was unavailable to users.